Post: Momentum for South Africa and for Forestry is Building

January 22, 2026

Momentum for South Africa and for Forestry is Building

As has been the norm for the past few years, 2025 presented our Industry and the world, with a fresh set of challenges. The most glaring of these in the global context, has been the second term of office of the convicted criminal and President of the United States of America, Donald Trump. Unlike the previous global crises of COVID-19, the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the Israeli government’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, this time we could actually anticipate, based on his shocking first term (even though it was partially masked by the world’s focus on COVID-19), the imminent disaster that was to be, Donald Trump 2.0. No one however, could have foreseen quite how catastrophic his erratic, hateful and self destructive (to the US) second term as President would be. It continues to feel like the whole world is watching a train wreck unfold in slow motion. For the decent people in the US, who didn’t support his appointment and probably for many of his would-be supporters too now, they are experiencing a similar sense of helpless disbelief, to that which we had to endure in South Africa, under our own convicted criminal and former President, Jacob Zuma, but we’ll come back to domestic matters shortly.

Trump and his cronies are literally following the stereotypical playbook of all dictators and tyrants. Manipulating the media, ruling through fear by suing and sanctioning dissenters inside and outside of his own party, unleashing the National Guard and ICE on US citizens in opposition party states, blaming minorities and immigrants for all the social and economic ills in the country, suspending the production and distribution of any official statistics on employment, prices and GDP, which don’t support his fallacious claims of improving the US and all the while, using his office to further his own personal interests and those of his cronies. Where have we seen this movie before? Oh yes, Jacob Zuma used the same playbook, as did Stalin, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, the Kim dynasty of North Korea, Putin and of course the archetypal tyrant, Hitler.

Trump’s infantile and reckless use of tariffs as a negotiating tool, which have served mainly to further his own personal interests, have thankfully had little impact on our Sector because we export very few forest products to the United States. This has unfortunately not been the case for all Sectors in South Africa and Sectors like agriculture and motor manufacturing, have had to move quickly to protect themselves and establish new and more predictable markets. While the rest of the world and South Africa, have been trying to find some method or pattern in the madness of Trump, one analyst quipped that this is a futile exercise, because “Nothing rhymes with orange”.

Our economy fortunately, has shrugged off the nonsensical and unpredictable tariff wars being waged by Trump, which have only served to enrich his closest allies, by allowing them to massively short all of the major US stock exchanges and make billions of Dollars in illicit profit, through mega-scale insider trading activity. Trump even bragged about this in a live international news broadcast from the White House. These are truly unbelievable and unprecedented times for the US and for global geopolitics. On a positive note, however, and in paraphrasing the well-known expression, I can say with absolute certainty that, ‘This thing too shall pass’. Before we reflect on the other positive factors for our Sector and the country more broadly, we should deal with some of our domestic challenges. While we have rightfully been full of praise for our first coalition government in 78 years, it has not been without its own problems. The climate within Parliament and Cabinet has indeed remained largely stable, enabling constructive policy debate and oversight, and one of the best indicators of this has been the drastic reduction in potentially damaging legislation coming out of Parliament since the GNU formed in 2024. Similarly the parties in the GNU approved the Minister of Finance’s mid-term budget without any debate, which is a stark change from what happened when he presented the Budget in February of this year.

For our Sector, however, there have been some major political changes. FSA was invited in August, to make a presentation to, and participate in, a high-level roundtable of the National Planning Commission and Operation Vulindlela (both Presidency-led), on the challenges in implementing our Forestry Masterplan with the DFFE. Our presentation focused strongly on the lapses by the DFFE in the areas of increasing and protecting timber resources in the country and supporting existing and new entrants. We also noted the absence of any engagement by Minister Dion George with our Industry, despite our efforts through official channels and his own political party, to get his attention. Soon after this engagement both Minister George and Deputy Minister Singh attended a two-day visit to Industry, which was kindly co-hosted by SAPPI, who presented an excellent programme of events, which provided an opportunity to show the political heads of DFFE, tangible examples of how the DFFE’s ongoing failures were negatively impacting the Sector and country. We were delighted to see that several commitments made by the Minister and Deputy Minister were honoured less than a week later. Shortly after this engagement, Minister George allocated the Forestry function to Deputy Minister Singh, whose leadership has continued to produce measurable improvements. Among these are the DFFE commitments to redoing the bidding processes for the Category B and C plantations, resolving the frustrations we have experienced with the DFFE/FSA MoU on forestry pests and diseases, securing funding for the long-delayed national fire database, engaging with Minister Steenhuisen on the ongoing challenges at the Registrar for agricultural remedies and engaging with Minister Creecy on the Illovo Bridge crisis and key roads which serve our Industry. Unfortunately, however, things unravelled quickly in November for our political leadership in DFFE, with Minister George being recalled by the Democratic Alliance and Minister Willem Aucamp being installed in his place. We have reached out to Minister Aucamp to invite him to engage with our Sector and hopefully this won’t take more than a year, as happened with Dion George. That the DA is demonstrating such public hostility between their leaders, is highly regrettable, given that they have had so many years to groom their shadow Ministers and other office bearers, for this time when they have to govern. As we have repeatedly told members, we must focus less on political parties and more on the performance of their office bearers. In positive news on that front, Deputy Minister Singh and his highly-efficient staff in his office, remain firmly in control of the Forestry function and we are continuing to deepen our partnerships with them, which will hopefully accelerate the long overdue delivery from the DFFE Forestry officials.

In further positive news for our Sector, we have seenmassive domestic investments by FSA’s members. SAPPI, MONDI, PG BISON and many other companies have collectively invested R33.5 billion in additional capacity over the last six years, with another R5.1 billion in planned investment, recently announced by SAPPI. This is what makes securing dedicated focus by the DFFE so important, as it is through recapitalisation of the State’s Category B and C plantations, new afforestation and increased forest protection, that the additional fibre and jobs will come, to support these investments. Our volumes are increasing steadily and we have just recorded the highest timber volumes through FSA, for the last seven years in our year to date volumes. This is 8.6% higher than the same period last year with pulpwood volumes up 12%.

Our contribution to the transformation and development of our Sector and the country as a whole, continues to produce dividends, with our latest Status of Transformation report showing progress in all elements of our Sector scorecard. While Donald Trump and other neo-fascists in Europe and South America, openly abhor diversity, our Sector and country understand better than most other countries, that transformation isn’t solely a political and moral imperative. It also enables us to harness, develop and recognise the deep wells of human potential in our diverse country, which is one of South Africa’s unique characteristics and one which we should guard jealously. We are not the most successful rugby nation of all time for no reason and one only has to listen to the National Coach of the Springboks, to know that our strength as a nation, genuinely lies in our diversity. FSA remains a proud founding member of our excellent Forest Sector Charter Council and it continues to deliver the most outstanding transformative, economic, social and regulatory gains for our Sector.

For 2026, FSA has managed to secure 46% of our total budget from outside of our members’ funding contributions. This massive amount of leveraged funding has been made possible because we have established the Industry and FSA, over many years, as a credible and reliable partner domestically and internationally, both through our highly-effective Industry initiatives and through our highly-effective communications initiatives. To support us in driving these expanded Industry programmes, we are delighted that the Executive Committee endorsed the appointment of Messrs Stefan Links and Werner Meyer to our Research and Protection and our Operations business units, respectively. They are warmly welcomed into our small FSA team and they have both already demonstrated their tremendous value, in a short space of time.

At the macro-level, FSA remains closely-involved in the Presidency-led structures of Operation Vulindlela, led by Mr Rudi Dicks, who delivered the Keynote Address to our AGM in May, the National Logistics Crisis Committee, the National Planning Commission (referred to earlier) and the Human Resource Development Council. These high-level policy and planning engines, remain critical for aligning structural reforms to support investment, infrastructure development and employment in our Sector and the country more broadly.

In the broader economy and despite ongoing global disruptions from geopolitical conflicts (including the predicted disastrous second term of Donald Trump) and other causes of volatility in global markets, South Africa has demonstrated remarkable resilience. Inflation has fallen from around 5.3% to around 3.6%, the Rand has strengthened significantly by about 11%, the JSE has surged by a record 54% and FDI has improved, including in our Sector, where Rance Timbers have sold their majority share to New Forests Company in Australia. We greatly welcome such investments in our Sector, as they demonstrate that foreign capital now sees our Sector and South Africa, as a sound place to do business. In October, South Africa was removed from the G7’s Financial Action Task Force grey list, of countries for increased monitoring and in November, Standard and Poor’s upgraded our credit rating. Both of these major improvements will increase investor confidence, lower transaction costs, reduce SA’s reputational risk and increase FDI (as we have seen with the New Forests Company investment). Two weeks ago, the Business Day reported that R5 trillion had flowed back into the JSE, this year alone. On the issue of the ratings agencies of S+P, Moody’s and Fitch, it is worth remembering that these are all US-based ratings agencies established a century ago, to protect US capital from investing in risky countries. While S+P have just upgraded South Africa’s credit rating, all three US-based agencies have downgraded the US’ own credit ratings, for the first time in the history of the US! As I said earlier, these are truly unprecedented times for the United States.

We have also seen significant progress in anti-corruption and governance reforms. The prosecution of high-profile cases, including those arising from the Zondo Report, continues to demonstrate the State’s increasing commitment to accountability. We have also seen the impacts of the Parliamentary ad hoc Committee into the allegations made by General Mkhwanazi which are the subject of the much bigger Madlanga Commission of Inquiry into Criminality, Political Interference and Corruption in the Criminal Justice System. As we told members in February, these criminals, who profited off the poor by stealing hundreds of billions of Rands through their grand State capture project, now have limited options. Nathi Mthethwa is the most recent person to escape justice by defenestrating himself and he joins the likes of Tina Joemat-Pettersen and Gavin Watson, who also would not face their crimes.

Jacob Zuma has been ordered to pay back R28.9 million in State-funded legal fees (or have his pension attached), the High Court has dismissed Lucky Montana’s bid to interdict SARS from seizing his assets to satisfy his R55 million tax liability and Hangwani Maumela has just had all of his assets seized by the Asset Forfeiture Unit, to recover the R1.2 billion which he stole through the Thembisa hospital State-capture project and for which the brave Ms Babita Deokaran, was murdered.

FSA has always maintained that justice would eventually be served and the State administration would be significantly improved. The past 18 months since our historic General Election, has shown that these improvements are being seen on an almost daily basis.

The progress on crime and corruption for our Sector specifically, has also gained momentum and FSA remains closely involved in the National Priority Committee on Violence and Extortion at Commercial Sites. Most recently, Deputy Minister Singh’s office have sought a meeting with us to discuss the establishment of a specialised Forestry crimes unit, like that which exists for stock theft in agriculture.

So, using any metric one can think of, Forestry in South Africa and indeed the country as a whole, are objectively better off than we have been in many years and the momentum is still gaining. We have had three successive budget surpluses, the currency is stronger than it has been in years, domestic and international investment is flooding into the country and we are in an economic bloc with the rest of the BRICS nations whose combined share of global GDP is 34% larger than the G7 nations. The global disruption which the last few years has brought, has revealed many new opportunities for partnership and growth and South Africa has not been idle in pursuing these.

On behalf of the Staff and strategic partners of FSA, I would like to wish our members a joyful and safe festive season and every success in your businesses in the New Year. FSA will continue to do everything in our power, to support you in that objective.

Written By: Michael Peter, Executive Director – Forestry South Africa

Source: Forestry In Focus